I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship (21 page)

So I e-mailed the rescue group to initiate the adoption screening process. Although Larry and I were novice dog owners, it weighed heavily in our favor that we were in the process of moving from an apartment in Los Angeles to a single-family house in Phoenix, where we would be able to offer Murphy a fenced yard, grassy neighborhood parks, and a slavishly devoted owner who worked from home. After a quick meet and greet, the cofounder of the rescue group approved our application. He also told us how Murphy had ended up in the rescue group: The poor little mongrel had been found wandering the streets of South Central L.A., filthy, starving, but possessing an unmistakable charm and charisma. Oliver Twist with fur and fleas. Our hearts melted. We wrote the check, signed the contract, and picked up our new pack member on our way out of town.

Murphy didn't say much on the six-hour drive to Arizona. He curled up in the backseat, his gaze melancholy, and seemed reluctant to exit the car for walks when we stopped for gas. He turned up his nose at the premium kibble I offered him, to the point that I started to worry.

“What if he's sick?” I asked Larry as we pulled up to the In-N-Out drive-through. “What if he's so heartbroken to leave the only home he's ever known that he literally dies of the anguish?”

That's when Murphy caught a whiff of my husband's burger, and suddenly, a spark of life appeared in his liquid brown eyes. We offered him a broiled beef patty and he devoured it, then licked our hands to make sure he'd ingested every last molecule of meat.

I would later look back and pinpoint this moment as the opening salvo in his coup d'etat.

Despite his rakish good looks, this dog was no dumb blond. He was Niccolo Machiavelli trapped in Benji's body, and his campaign for world domination started with the hamburger, then progressed to the sleeping arrangements.

Before Larry and I finalized Murphy's adoption, we agreed on one very important ground rule: The dog would not sleep in our bed. The dog could sleep
next
to our bed, in a crate or a cushy nest of blankets, but not
in
the bed. We were newlyweds, and our bed was our sacred sanctuary. End of discussion.

We arrived in Phoenix on New Year's Day, which meant that the city's utility service offices were closed for the holiday, which meant that our new house did not yet have electricity or hot water. So we checked into a pet-friendly hotel, collapsed into bed, and turned off the lights.

That's when the barking started. Murphy, who up 'til now had not uttered so much as a whimper, let loose with a string of high-pitched barks that set my teeth on edge.

“Oh my God,” Larry said. “I'm deaf.”

“I will handle this,” I announced.

I turned on the lights, led Murphy gently but firmly back to his pimped-out orthopedic dog bed, commanded him to stay, and snuggled back under the covers.

This shut him up for all of two seconds. Then he started barking again, even louder.

“Just ignore him,” I whispered. “He has to learn that we mean what we say.”

“This hotel is booked to capacity and the walls are paper-thin,” Larry said.

“Trust me—ignore him. I took a whole class on animal cognition in grad school. I know whereof I speak.”

ROWF! ROWF! ROWF!

Our next-door neighbor pounded on the wall.

“I am not sleeping in the car tonight,” Larry said. “Let him up on the foot of the bed. Just this once.”

And with that, all our ground rules went straight out the window, along with a semester's worth of animal cognition. Murphy nestled into the crook behind my knees, suddenly sleepy and serene.

“Don't get too comfortable,” I warned him. “This will never happen again.”

Two days later, I took Murphy to the vet for a checkup. He capered around the waiting room, begging for treats and gladhanding the receptionists. Then the exam got under way and there were a lot of sidelong glances and scribbling in the chart.

“What?” I kept asking the tech, who refused to make eye contact. “What?”

Turned out, Murphy must have had an owner at some point during his hardscrabble upbringing on the south side. In addition to a D.I.Y. docked tail, he had matching ear hematomas, indicating that someone had cropped his ears in a less than humane fashion. But that was not the reason for all the chart scribbling.

Several hundred dollars and many X-rays later, the vet broke the bad news: “Your dog has a broken hip.” She clipped a black-and-white scan to the light box. “Actually, his whole pelvis is shattered. It looks like he got hit by a car.”

I gaped at her, openmouthed.

She lifted one eyebrow. “You had no idea?”

In the few days we'd known him, Murphy never betrayed his injury with the slightest limp. He raced after birds at the park with speed that put greyhounds to shame. He had a vertical leap like Michael Jordan and could snatch a used Kleenex out of my hand midair. When we called the rescue group to report all this, they were just as shocked as we were.

The vet referred us to a surgeon, who opened up Murphy's hip, and declared, “It looks like a jigsaw puzzle in there,” but did the best she could to realign what was left of his pelvic girdle and scrape out loose bone chips along with years' worth of scar tissue. While he was recovering from surgery, he had many fresh incisions and several types of pain medications, and to ensure that he didn't chew out his stitches or hurt himself while loopy on opiates, we let him sleep on the bed again, “just for a few more days.”

Over the next few months, I took him to a series of orthopedic specialists and drove across the city twice weekly for canine physical therapy sessions. We experimented with grain-free diets and fish oil supplements to reduce tissue inflammation. But let's be real, there's only so much you can do to cobble together a thousand shattered shards of skeleton. Murphy's body was never going to be whole again, but in true terrier fashion, he figured out a way to work this to his advantage. At home, his injury remained undetectable to the naked eye. When we were out and about, however, and strangers exclaimed over how adorable he was, Murphy would start hobbling around with an exaggerated limp and martyred-saint eyes. His new acquaintances would immediately shower him with affection and whatever food they happened to have on them, and he would accept all this with a thumping tail stub and a brave show of stoicism in the aftermath of tragedy. Then the suckers would continue on their way and Murphy would resume strutting along like Gisele on the catwalk.

A year or so after we adopted Murphy, I had another late-night snack-food episode on Petfinder, and we ended up with two large, lovable red mutts. Roxie Hart (What can I say? The dog has stage presence) is a doe-eyed little lady so sweet that I ended up training her to be a therapy dog at a family crisis shelter. Friday is a wrinkly browed lug with jaws like an alligator, a head like an anvil, and only two states of consciousness: comatose and semi-comatose. Both of them outweighed Murphy by at least forty pounds, yet he ruled over them with an iron fist, treating them like fraternity pledges in a never-ending Hell Week. When he wasn't ordering his oversized flunkies to fetch him bonbons or shaking them down for their Nylabones, he was tattling on them for the slightest infractions.

“That Murphy's something else,” my mom said when she came out to Phoenix for a visit. Apparently, she'd left an empty plastic water bottle on our coffee table and Roxie, unable to resist anything that might conceivably serve as a chew toy, had nabbed it and smuggled it out the doggie door into the backyard. Murphy immediately launched into his trademark bark, and when no one rushed out to punish Roxie, he wrestled the water bottle away from her, carried it back inside, and dropped it at my mother's feet. “He's like Lassie.”

Exactly like Lassie. Except, rather than wasting his time with some snot-nosed kid trapped in a well, Murphy reserved his vigilance for catching his subordinates in the act of counter-surfing, a crime he believed should be punishable by forfeiture of dinner and/or death.

It goes without saying that Roxie and Friday were banned from the bed. Hell, Larry and I were lucky to be up there at this point. Over the years, Murphy had expanded his personal mattress territory by snuggling into the valley of comforter between me and my husband, then bracing his back against me, his feet against Larry, and slooowly stretching out his legs and locking his knees. Blanketless, we shivered and clung to the edges, sleeping fitfully between bouts of canine kickboxing and snoring. We had long ago given up on evicting him, so our only revenge was humiliation and cheap laughs. I would drape a sheet over his head, kerchief-style, and pretend he was an old-timey Russian peasant waiting in the bread line. We had a little voice for him and everything: “Alms for the poor.”

Every night after dinner, we would torment him by grabbing his leash, twirling it around, and making him wait for us to drop the W-word. Larry would casually remark, “Hey, Beth, I was thinking about doing some painting. Have you seen my
smock
?”

To which I would reply, “No, but I'm going to the pawnshop later, so let me know if you've got anything to
hock
.”

“What time is it? Let me check the
clock
.”

We would go through endless variations—
sock, Glock, dock, rock
—before finally acknowledging the irate yellow dog waiting by the door: “Oh, gosh, Murphy, I didn't see you there. Did you happen to want a
walk
?”

We cracked ourselves up.

Murphy knew he was being
mock
ed, and he'd glare at us with blistering scorn, clearly praying for the power of speech so he could deliver to us the verbal flaying we deserved, but he bided his time and took his revenge when he knew it would hurt us most—the crack of dawn on Sunday morning.

With the unerring precision of a fine Swiss timepiece, Murphy demanded breakfast at six thirty a.m. sharp every morning. Six thirty-one was unacceptable. Weekends and holidays were no excuse. So every day, at exactly six twenty-nine, he would crouch over Larry, fix him with psycho, spirally eyes, and emit a series of little half woofs. He knew that full-fledged barking was forbidden, so instead of busting out the full
rowf
, he'd just go
rrr
—(pause),
ro
—(pause),
row
—until Larry opened one eye just a crack. This was Murphy's cue to drape himself across Larry's face and start wagging his entire body, which would whip Roxie and Friday into a frenzy. The master bedroom devolved into a canine tornado of whining, slobbering, and shedding until somebody broke down and coughed up some kibble.

Because Murphy had beaten so many odds over the years, I let myself believe that his devastating injuries would never catch up with him. He was sassy and spry, and I had every confidence that he could single-handedly pioneer the necessary stem cell/reparative gene therapy to rebuild his skeletal structure when his pelvic bones finally gave out. But then, one rainy autumn evening, he started limping for real. Not to score food or attention, but because crippling arthritis had set in. He stopped hogging the bed at night and started sleeping with his hip pressed against my belly, using me as a human heating pad. Our vet upped the dosage of his anti-inflammatory and prescribed heavy-duty painkillers, but nothing helped. He started going after the other dogs when they accidentally jostled him, not with warning nips but with real bites. We knew it was time to let him go when the diabolical glint in his eyes dimmed and we had to start coaxing him to start his day at the unheard-of hour of eight a.m.

Putting Murphy down was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made; although his body could no longer function, his mind remained razor-sharp. Larry offered to take him to the vet's office for the last time, but we both understood that in all the ways that mattered most, Murphy was mine. I had to see him all the way through.

I wish I could say that I displayed the same unflinching terrier toughness that Murphy did when his final moments arrived, but I was a blotchy-eyed, runny-nosed, ugly crying mess. “We're never getting another dog,” I told Larry between sobs. “I can't go through this again.”

Two weeks later, my Web browser found itself open to
Petfinder.com
.

I'll always love Murphy and I'll never forget him—not that I could, he made sure of that. To this day, we find errant wisps of his yellow fur lodged in the back of the linen closet and deep in the bowels of the couch. A pointed reminder, across space and time and the sweet hereafter, that he will always be my scruffy-eared soul mate . . . and he's got first dibs on the bed forever.

Fairy Tales Can Come True

Jill Conner Browne

Ever take notice of how quickly your life can change forever? One minute you're just bumbling along as usual and then, without the slightest suspicion on your part that
something
is about to happen that will put a Major Wrinkle in your existence, suddenly you feel metal underfoot and too late you realize that you have just stepped on the garden hoe and the knowledge that you are about to be struck smack in the middle of the face with the handle traveling at warp speed comes just a nanosecond too late for you to dodge it. Sometimes, it's a tragedy—sometimes, it's a glorious gift—sometimes, it's not what you think it is at all, even when it's happening. Life sometimes sends out previews—but It never reveals the Surprise Ending.

This story is so amazing you might expect it to begin with “Once upon a time, long long ago.” But it's
true
, so it goes like this: I am driving to the YMCA at about nine a.m. to teach an aerobics class. As I approach the Woodrow Wilson Overpass, I have just the slightest sense of foreboding. Traffic is not behaving very well. As I come closer, I see, to my utter amazement, that there is a
pack of dogs
—on the interstate bridge, circulating freely among the traffic. As I inch closer, I see that one of the dogs has been hit, and she is dragging herself by her front legs, trying desperately to get out of the road, but alas,
none
of the sonsabitches in the cars will stop long enough to let her get past.